User eerielinux discusses their experience in using both Linux and *BSD operating systems. PC-BSD and TrueOS are also mentioned. The author describes what its like using ZFSonLinux and ZFS on a FreeBSD system. Follow the link below for the full story.

This is kind of the post that I wanted to write much earlier this year. After running a Linux-only environment at home for years, I had become less and less happy with the general direction things seem to be heading. I had run FreeBSD and OpenBSD on real hardware (old laptops) and several versions of PC-BSD in VirtualBox over the years. In January I decided to step forward and install PC-BSD (10.2) on my primary computer for daily usage. It remained a short episode – and this post will describe why. When TrueOS was released to the public I decided to try out that right away. But that will be another post.

Michael Larabel of Phoronix performed several benchmark tests between the latest FreeBSD (note that it is not the official 11.0-RELEASE), Ubuntu, and macOS Sierra operating systems on the MacBook Air. The tests performed range from SQLite, OpenMP, to the LLVM Clang compiler. See the link below for the detailed results.

Yesterday I published some macOS 10.2 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS benchmarks from a Mac Mini and MacBook Air systems. For those curious if BSDs can outperform macOS Sierra on Apple hardware, I tested the MacBook Air with FreeBSD 11.0 compared to the Linux and macOS results on that Core i5 system. Here are those results.

FreeBSD 11.0 AMD64 was tested on the Haswell-based MacBook Air and it actually worked well. Even the HD Graphics 5000 were playing nicely with the FreeBSD DRM Intel driver. The MacBook Air is equipped with a Core i5 4250U CPU with HD Graphics 5000, 4GB of DDR3 memory, and a 120GB Apple SSD. The install was smooth and was off to the races with testing.

Michael Larabel of Phoronix documents his recent benchmarks between early versions of FreeBSD 11.0, DragonFlyBSD, and various Linux distributions. See the link below for the full report — ranging from SQLite tests, PostMark, GraphicsMagick, to LAME MP3 encoding.

Following last week’s DragonFlyBSD 4.6 benchmarks I carried out a fresh comparison of FreeBSD 10.3 vs. FreeBSD 11.0 (Beta 4 at the time) along with the DragonFlyBSD results and a few of the popular Linux distributions. Here are those numbers.

Tested for this comparison were DragonFlyBSD 4.4.3, DragonFlyBSD 4.6.0, FreeBSD 10.3, FreeBSD 11.0-BETA4, Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10 in its current development state, Intel Clear Linux, and CentOS Linux 7. The x86_64/amd64 version of each OS was tested on a clean install each time using the same system hardware and each OS left to its default settings/packages.

This article by Hamza Sheikh details his journey of moving from Linux to FreeBSD. He discusses everything from the ports offered, BSD licensing, choosing from the various BSD distributions, to ZFS. See the link below for the full story.

Before going into why FreeBSD is now my preferred OS for learning UNIX, let us review why I used Linux for a long time.

I started with Red Hat (before RHEL) in the early 2000s; tried to install it on a variety of hardware from CDs found in the back pages of books from the library. There was not a single working install so I gave up. Then came the Ubuntu hype, and around 2006 I built a computer specifically to install and learn it. Everything – except Wi-Fi – worked out of the box. I managed to get Wi-Fi working with ndiswrapper reading a lot of community documentation. I now had a working box and I began my Linux journey.

User Eerie Linux discusses the differences between documentation provided by Linux and FreeBSD. Read on about why the FreeBSD man pages and handbook can serve as an excellent resource for those who may not know when configuring the operating system.

With every operating system there comes the time when you need help with something (if you’re not the absolute Über-guru, that is). If you are in need of help, there are many ways to get it. You can ask an experienced colleague or friend if available. If not, you can search the web. There is a very high possibility of the information that you need being out there, somewhere. If not, you could ask for help and hope that somebody answers. Well, or you could consult the documentation!

… There are many sources on the net that say BSD has far superior documentation compared to Linux. And I was impressed enough about that fact to add another one by writing this post. So if you’re a *BSD user and you need help I can only give the advice to take the time to read some manpages instead of looking or even asking on the net. It is much more rewarding to figure out things yourself using the documentation and the chance is quite high that you’ll learn another useful thing or two from it!

Michael Larabel of Phoronix recently ran some benchmark tests, comparing FreeBSD & PC-BSD 10.3 with Linux. He tests everything from database benchmarks to the compiler. See the detailed results in the link below.

Larry the BSD Guy is back with another blog, this time speaking on his experiences of hosting a BSD talk. With the many similarities between open source operating systems, he speaks on the obstacles faced when presenting a specific subject to the community. Read his full blog at the link below.

The BSD devil resides in a penguin’s DNA.

After answering various calls for presentations to a few upcoming shows, it stands to reason that Tom Petty is right: The waiting is the hardest part.

Because I now use PC-BSD on a daily basis, the idea going forward is to pitch talks about the conversion from one side of the Free/Open Source Software street to the other; the uplifting situations and occasional hurdle such a conversion brings, and to outline the similarities (lots) and differences (few, but relatively significant) between Linux distros and BSD variants.

Full disclosure: No one realizes more than I do how difficult this talk is to compartmentalize among the specific categories that some shows have. This talk can best be described as a verbal Venn diagram showing the overlapping advantages that Linux and BSD provide, and then point out the differences between the two.

Check out what users of /r/freebsd have to say about the pros and cons of FreeBSD over Linux. This lengthy discussion has this particular post voted to the top:

The main advantage for me so far is root/boot on ZFS out of the box without much effort. Data integrity matters.

pf is a decent firewall and I use it everywhere.

Also, dtrace. It’s kind of a big deal.

Other than that there’s not much that directly matters to me. Some will talk about the BSD system model and tight integration of packages and so forth but from the user perspective I don’t notice much difference, aside from fewer packages being available for BSD. I use BSD for fileservers and routers and am very satisfied. Linux everywhere else currently for applications, like web/database servers, or virtualizing our Windows systems. – /u/IBSUchild

Michael Larabel of Phoronix recently compared three BSD systems (DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and PC-BSD) against ten Linux distributions, starting with benchmarks all the way to file compression speeds.

Earlier this week I posted the results of a 10-way Linux distribution battle on the same Intel Xeon system and using all of the popular and latest Linux distribution releases. Taking things further, the article today has those results complemented by results on the Xeon system for several BSD operating systems. For seeing how the BSD performance stacks up to Linux, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD were benchmarked.

pairBlog highlights several differences between Ubuntu and FreeBSD, for those looking for a hosting solution.

Choosing an Operating System for your account can feel a bit daunting. When first setting up a Hosting Account, many worry which OS is right for their needs. What’s the difference between FreeBSD and Ubuntu? Which one is right for me?

Ubuntu vs FreeBSD

Well good news is that unless you are planning on performing some “in-depth” development on your account, you are unlikely to notice much of a difference between an Ubuntu & FreeBSD hosting account. Generally the systems are more alike than they are different. Both are open source, free for use, and based on Unix-like operating systems.